Guitar Triads Chart (Augmented)

Guitar Triads (Augmented)
Hi, I'm Grey, and this is Hub Guitar.
We're going to talk about augmented triads today. These are like a major triad except the fifth of the chord is raised by half step. If you don't know what I mean by that, a little theory is in order.
Within a major scale, the distance to the first note to the third note is called a major third. There are three half-steps in between, so the major third is the note that is four half-steps above the root.
An augmented triad is built by stacking two of these on top of each other. For C major I would need C [1,2,3,4] and E. And then E [1,2,3,4] to G#. A C major augmented triad is C E G#. Let's try another one. From A major I would need A [1,2,3,4] to C# and C# [1,2,3,4] to the note F here, although actually I will still like to call it E# because I don't want to change the letter from F to G. Don't worry too much about this technicality.
On the guitar, these triads are symmetrical, meaning there's really only one chord shape to learn and you've learned them all.
Let's get started. Here are our augmented triads on strings 654 in A: [demonstration of 654]
Let's move those to strings 543: [demonstration]
And now to strings 432. Note that the pattern looks a bit different here. The highest note has crossed over the chasm of the B string, which means that now I need to raise the highest pitched note by one half step to make sure it reaches the correct pitch. We'll learn more on this later. [demonstration]
Now to strings 321. On this one, the top two notes look like the old pattern but from the first one to the second one does not. That's because I had to raise the second note now because that's the note that crosses onto the B string.

This example uses the A+ triad, consisting of the notes A, C♯, and E♯.

A Bit of Theory...

This chord is somewhat like a modified major chord (A C♯ E) with a raised fifth degree (E becomes E♯).

We call the note E♯ instead of F to preserve its role as the 5th of the chord. The word “F”, being 6 letters away from A (instead of 5, as in the case of E) would imply that the tone is acting as the 6th scale degree from the key of A when its role in this chord is as an altered fifth.

This chord is unusual for two reasons:

This chord cannot be produced naturally from any major scale. That is, take the notes of any major scale (for example in C: C, D, E, F, G, A, B) and no combination of those tones can produce this structure of two consecutive major thirds).

This is one of few structures that is totally symmetrical, dividing the 12-tone chromatic scale into four perfect pieces. That means that the first inversion of this chord is the same shape as the root position and is, itself, a C♯+ chord. It also means there are really only 4 augmented chords in existence.